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Decoys get their due as folk art specimens

TIM JOHNSON
9:02 p.m. EDT August 23, 2014

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A swan decoy, attributed to Samuel T. Barnes, on display at the Shelburne Museum on Aug. 12. Only a fraction of the museum’s vast collection of decoys is on public view while the museum’s Dorset House is being refurbished in order to showcase the majority of the works.
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SHELBURNE – As the fall duck season approaches, a hunter's thoughts might turn to decoys. So might a museum-goer's.

Decoys — more than a thousand of them, spanning nearly two centuries — are among the Shelburne Museum's prized collections. They aren't just ducks, either: swans, loons, snipes, willets, other shore birds, even a few fish.

The core collection of about 400 wildfowl decoys, acquired in 1952 by museum-founder Electra Havemayer Webb, has grown to about 1,400 objects, including paintings, prints and Audubon engravings. According to Rick Kerschner, the museum's director of preservation and conservation, this may well be the world's best collection of decoys on public view.

As a form of folk art, decoys have grown in popularity among private collectors. In 2007, two decoys by Massachusetts artisan Elmer Crowell (1862-1952) sold for $1.13 million to an undisclosed buyer. In reporting the sale, the Boston Globe likened Crowell to the Leonardo da Vinci of waterfowl decoy makers.

Crowell is well represented in the Shelburne collection, as are other craftsmen who are household names among decoy aficionados: John Blair, Nathan Rawley Horner, Albert Laing, Charles Osgood, Shang Wheeler, and many more.

Here's the thing, though: Most of their masterworks are not on display. They'll be in storage for a couple of years as the museum rehabilitates and refits the their permanent home. That's the Dorset House, a Greek-revival-style structure built in East Dorset in 1832 and moved to the museum in 1953.

The museum recently was awarded a $350,000 matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that will allow the building to be overhauled, with new wiring and lighting, insulation, environmental controls, upgraded fire-protecton and security systems, and redesigned exhibit spaces.

While that work is going on, a sample of the decoy collection can be seen at the museum's Stagecoach Inn, along with other folk art displays.

It's enough to whet a visitor's appetite for more. Ultimately, the retooled Dorset House will hold virtually the entire decoy collection, with open storage on the second floor. That's in keeping with Webb's original commitment to exhibit as many objects as possible.

A decoy primer

Decoys come in many forms for many uses — by military tacticians, pickpockets, police and swindlers among others, not just hunters.

There are companies that make inflatable military decoys that can simulate everything from a missile launcher to an F-16. The British Navy used decoy ships, or "Q-boats," in World War I as a means of picking off enemy submarines.

Police have used "decoy vehicles" to entrap car thieves or car burglars. Human decoys who worked as police informers used to be known as "stool pigeons." That term entered American slang in the mid-19th century and derived from a namesake avian decoy.

The original stool pigeon was a live bird, tied to a pole that could be moved up and down by a concealed hunter who would either shoot the oncoming prey or lure it into a net. The massive, commercial slaughter of passenger pigeons in the 19th century, and their resulting extinction, presumably owes something to the stool pigeon.

Live waterfowl were being used to draw birds into traps in 17th century England: "Wilde Ducks, that are tamed and made Decoyes, to intice and betray their fellows," according to a 1661 publication cited by the Oxford English Dictionary.

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A pair of yellow legs decoys, maker unknown, on display at the Shelburne Museum on Aug. 12. Only a fraction of the museum’s vast collection of decoys is on public view while the museum’s Dorset House is being refurbished in order to showcase the majority of the works.
(Photo:
GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS
)

In Britain, the common meaning of "decoy" is the trap, not just the lure. Here's the OED's first definition: "A pond or pool out of which run narrow arms or 'pipes' covered with network or other contrivances into which wild ducks or other fowl may be allured and there caught."

This pastoral construction, which used to be common in Britain and Europe, can also be called a "coy," which the OED defines as "a place constructed for entrapping ducks or other wild fowl." (The origin of of the "de-" prefix is unclear, but "coy" is apparently derived from the Dutch "kooi," which means cage.) At the Hale Duck Decoy, a historic site that has been preserved in Cheshire, England, dogs were used to scare ducks into the "pipes," hooped nets overarching the appendages of the pond.

In North America, by contrast, the prevalent waterfowl decoy was the artificial bird — developed first by Native Americans and then adopted and elaborated by white settlers.

Duck and goose decoys made of reeds, discovered in a Nevada cave in the 1920s, are believed to be around 2,000 years old. They're displayed in an anthropological museum at the University of California-Berkeley.

Across the continent, a French explorer watched Indians use decoys on a Lake Champlain marsh in the late 17th century. He observed the waiting hunters hiding in "huts" made of branches and leaves.

"For a decoy they have the skins of geese, bustards and ducks, dryed an stuffed with hay," wrote Baron Lahantan, in an account published in 1703. "The place being frequented by wonderfull numbers of geese, ducks, bustards, teals and an infinity of other waterfowls ... They repair to the same place and so give the savages an opportunity of shooting them either flying or upon the water."

This excerpt is quoted in "Wild Fowl Decoys," by Joel Barber, first published in 1934. Barber was a collector whose passion for his subject found expression in the first comprehensive book of its kind, all about decoys.

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Rick Kerschner, the Shelburne Museum’s conservator, examines one of the hundreds of the museum’s collection of decoys in storage in Shelburne on Aug. 12. Looking on is Lauren Moschner, the museum’s cataloger. Only a fraction of the museum’s vast collection of decoys is on public view while the museum’s Dorset House is being refurbished in order to showcase the majority of the works.(Photo: GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS)

"The origin and development of decoys has remained in persistent obscurity ..." he wrote. "No one has ever bothered about them as I have, perhaps no one ever thought about it. But it is my wish that decoy ducks of American duck shooting have a pedigree of their own."

Fulfillment of that wish falls partly to the Shelburne Museum. After Barber died, his sizable flock went to Electra Havemayer Webb, a collector of eclectic Americana who also happened to be an avid hunter.

Showcase specimens

The museum's current exhibit includes a Canada goose fashioned by Capt. Charles Osgood, of Salem, Mass., in about 1849. Legend has it, according to the display text, that this was one of five decoys Osgood made in San Francisco while waiting for his ship to be loaded. The body is hollow, the head detachable.

Also on display are several shorebird "stick-ups" — small carved bodies mounted on dowels that could be shoved into the sand. Many birds in the collection show signs of having been "gunned over," with patches of paint blasted away. As conservator, Kerschner ensures that they're maintained in that state.

A swan decoy, circa 1890, is attributed to Samuel T. Barnes of Havre de Grace, Md. Swans were rarely hunted for food in the New World, the museum text tells us. Rather, swan decoys were used as "confidence" birds "to create the illusion of a safe and biologically diverse environment, a suitable layover for migrating ducks." The decoy would help lure flocks of black ducks to the Susquehanna Flats, and hunters would fire away.

Nineteenth-century America saw the emergence of "the market gunner" who brought in scores of ducks a day to supply urban markets fed by both butchers and milliners.

"How well he supplied this demand is now a matter of national regret," Barber wrote. He called the latter 19th-century "the greatest era of Wild-fowl shooting the world has ever known." Decoys were key to the market gunners' success, and Barber describes a three-man crew that operated a double battery all day off Long Island in early December 1898. They used about 250 decoys and hauled in about 640 birds, "mostly broadbill," by nightfall.

Carnage like this ended in 1918, when the Migratory Bird Treaty Act offered protection to native birds and put the market gunners out of business. Game birds were left to sportsmen, some of whom took to making their own decoys, while others continued to use factory-produced wooden versions until the mid-20th century, when plastic took over.

Vermont's Canada geese season opens Sept. 2. A four-pack of plastic Canada geese decoys can be had at Walmart for $44.88. They don't really qualify as Americana, though, because they're made in Mexico.

Contact Tim Johnson at 660-1808 or tjohnson@burlingtonfreepress.com

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A Canada goose decoy, center, by Captain Charles Osgood, on display at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne on Aug. 12. Only a fraction of the museum’s vast collection of decoys is on public view while the museum’s Dorset House is being refurbished in order to showcase the majority of the works.
(Photo:
GLENN RUSSELL/FREE PRESS
)